Bed Bath & Beyond sold the Christmas Tree Shops (CTS) retail brand, along with other non-core assets, in Nov. 2020 for a total of $250 million. To prepare its systems for a busy 2021 holiday season, CTS had to achieve technology independence and upgrade its hybrid cloud operations.
“We had a mix of legacy, off-the-shelf, and self-developed systems at the time — some of those systems served our needs well, others less so,” said Chris Corbin, VP of Enterprise Systems at Christmas Tree Shops in a statement. “It would have been cost-prohibitive to update and integrate all of those systems as we made the split.”
CTS partnered with enterprise automation company SnapLogic both to facilitate the transition as painlessly as possible, and in a timeframe of less than one year. CTS has completed more than 250 integrations over the past year through the platform, allowing the retailer to create enterprise-wide improvements to its operational and analytical data flows.
“Under our previous parent company, access to information was a struggle across the board, and our leadership had no visibility into intraday store performance,” said Corbin. “We saw this as an opportunity to modernize our operations and the technology running them, by upgrading core existing systems while at the same time bringing on board newer, best-of-breed cloud technologies that allowed us to explore new opportunities.”
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The transition integrated core legacy systems into cloud-based technologies across departments including human resources, finance, sales and operations. Through the partnership, CTS was able to retain its existing data and information, which had previously been stored within BB&B’s system, without disrupting ongoing business that included holiday hiring of seasonal associates.
“It was critical that while undertaking this separation and updating our technology infrastructure that we not impact the front line of the business — the selling of goods as well as the onboarding and compensation of our employees had to continue without interruption,” added Corbin. “SnapLogic’s ease-of-use and fast time-to-value enabled us to complete these integrations quickly and be ready for the holiday season when both the volume of sales and the number of seasonal staff increased.”
As it moved toward infrastructure independence, CTS and SnapLogic worked together to ensure the company’s systems, including time-and-attendance tools and near-real-time sales reporting, operated without interruption.
“Many organizations are in situations similar to CTS — where integrations need to happen quickly to speed up business processes and data flow across the enterprise, all with zero downtime or disruption to the business,” said Craig Stewart, Chief Data Officer at SnapLogic in a statement. “We’ve architected it such that users of all skill levels across the business can be productive quickly while ensuring the platform holds up to the most complex enterprise integration requirements.”
